The Art of Building Reception: Aris Konstantinidis behind the Global Published Life of his Weekend House in Anavyssos (1962–2014)

Author:

Stylianos Giamarelos

The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, GB

About Stylianos

Abstract

Aris Konstantinidis’s Weekend House in Anavyssos (1962–1964) holds an emblematic place within his oeuvre. This article uncovers the architect’s own role in building the global reception of this project through a tripartite account of its global published life from the printed page to the digital website over the last five decades (1962–2014). Konstantinidis created a uniquely hermetic zone around his work by adopting a publishing practice that combines his own photographs as narrative and his accompanying text as an architectural manifesto of his regional modernism. Highlighting turning points in the published life of this building, the article relates the original gaze of the architect to the gaze adopted by each subsequent researcher of his work. The conclusion recalibrates the gaze of the contemporary architectural historian towards an architectural work that has effectively been doubly built to be received as canonical, as well as an architectural persona that is often easily romanticised in its dominant interpretations.

How to Cite:
Giamarelos, S., 2014. The Art of Building Reception: Aris Konstantinidis behind the Global Published Life of his Weekend House in Anavyssos (1962–2014). Architectural Histories, 2(1), p.Art. 22. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.bx

Introduction

If Beatriz Colomina (1994) was right to imply
that the history of the Modern Movement and its eventual reception is inextricably
linked with the way in which its canonical figures made use of photography and mass
media, then contemporary architectural historians cannot help but wonder whether
this has also been the case for alternative regional modernisms that have
historically developed around the world. Conversely, they may also wonder whether
the historical development of various regional modernisms around the globe implies a
different relationship of their canonical figures with architectural publications,
photography, and mass media. The further exploration of such questions seems likely
to help architectural historians eventually arrive at a more nuanced understanding
of the historical mechanics behind both the global dissemination of modernism and
the subsequent proliferation of its regional variants. In this article, I explore
those broader questions by focusing on the work of the Greek architect Aris
Konstantinidis (1913–1993). His case is perhaps unique, especially when one
considers the ways in which he managed to create a hermetic zone around his work
through his publications. The Weekend House in Anavyssos (1962–1964), usually
regarded as a landmark work in his oeuvre, serves here as a vehicle for exploring
Konstantinidis’s use of architectural media in building the reception, by the
global community of his fellow architects, of his own work.

By closely following the published life of this building over the course of five
decades, I retrace the strong hold Konstantinidis’s gaze still retains over
its actual historical reception. The word ‘gaze’ is used here to imply a
certain Weltanschauung; in other words, the eye of an architect
that both looks and sees. In Konstantinidis’s publications, the combination of
the printed word with the built work — photographed by the architect himself
to feature on the pages of the architectural publication — shapes an
understanding of the building as an embodiment of architectural theory,
‘reif[ying] an individual and specific set of assumptions and from that point
of view mak[ing] clear what architecture is, and should be’ (Higgott 2007: 7–8).
Konstantinidis’s concerted publishing strategy succeeded in endowing the
Weekend House with a timeless, transcendental aura. Barely inhabited by its original
owner and his successors, the building nonetheless enjoyed a much richer life of its
own in architectural publications. This article, organised around a tripartite
periodisation of these publications (from the original ones, designed and edited by
the architect himself, to the secondary literature of architectural history and
theory that followed, and from there on to the contemporary era of digital
reproduction), the article defines key moments in this history of
Konstantinidis’s modes of building reception. In the last section, I revisit
Colomina’s work in order to explore the tensions inherent in the
Konstantinidis-Corbusier dialectics, by focusing on questions concerning the
relation of their work with nature and landscape, as well as their peculiar
interplay with ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The article then
concludes with an attempt to remove the distorting veil of the published life from
both the House and its architect, ‘the doyen of contemporary Greek
architecture’ (Tzonis and Lefaivre 1985:
17). It does so by offering a historically informed recalibration of the
gaze of the contemporary architectural historian towards an architectural work that
has effectively been doubly built to be received as canonical, as well as an
architectural persona that is often easily romanticised in its dominant
interpretations.

1962–1983: A life published by Aris Konstantinidis

The list of publications about the Weekend House in Anavyssos, as published by the
architect himself (Konstantinidis 1984: 343),
provides an obvious springboard for some initial remarks. For instance, it is
significant to note that the obviously rich published life already enjoyed by the
Weekend House, both in Greece and abroad, in 1984 was in fact cautiously
orchestrated by its own architect. Indeed, this is the house that he chose to
publish more than any other of his residential works — and it is one of his
most published buildings in general.1 This fact
alone implies that Konstantinidis himself not only regarded the Weekend House as a
rather important piece in his oeuvre, but he had already been at work for more than
two decades (as I will argue later) in building its reception, too. That is to say,
he clearly intended to establish its importance by presenting it as such. In the
summative monograph of his work, published in 1981, edited by himself, the Weekend
House holds the prestigious first place in the diagram explaining his own system for
standardising construction (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Selected pages from Aris Konstantinidis’s publications (1981; 1984), presenting the Weekend House in Anavyssos as an initial
generator of the architect’s standardisation model (right), as well as
including the first list of its publications provided by Konstantinidis
(left). Reproduced with permission of Agra Publications and Dimitris
Konstantinidis.

The architect thus suggests that this house is in fact the generator of the basic
residential typology he adopted, with slight variations,2 throughout his whole career. This suggestion is implicitly reinforced
by the fact that there is always a place for some of the most characteristic images
and photographs of the Weekend House in almost every publication by the architect.
He never fails to include it even in his largely unrelated publications —
where it is still featured in inside covers (for instance, Konstantinidis 1984; 1992a). Indeed, the Weekend House is never absent from any major moment
in the life of its architect.3 In a posthumously
published interview (Themelis 2000),
originally conducted on 12 April 1991, Konstantinidis characteristically refers to
this ‘small house’4 in Anavyssos as
holding a special place in his heart.

A simple review of the architect’s own 1984 list of publications helps uncover
yet another significant fact: the Weekend House was first published on German soil.
In other words, an architecture that its architect constantly promoted as
‘geographical’ (that is, organically connected with its Greek native
landscape and climate) was originally published abroad. Practical or coincidental
issues aside, the most important of which might be the relative scarcity of
specialised periodicals and journals of architecture in Greece of the early
1960s,5 the act of publishing this
architecture abroad first may also accurately reflect one of Konstantinidis’s
deepest convictions: namely, that the reach of his own vision of architecture and
dwelling is in fact ecumenical.6 His envisioned
‘true architecture’ can therefore be applied anywhere — but not as
an international style or, in his own words, a universal ‘winebox’
(Konstantinidis 1978: 46–47). His
‘timeless type’ of construction is imbued with local modifications.
Thus, he promotes an architecture that is always situated, as if sprouting as
naturally as a tree from a specific living habitat in a certain region (see Konstantinidis 1978: 10; 1992c: 192, 226–227, 311–312). It is generalisable
as an exportable ‘type’ only inasmuch as different places share similar
conditions (see Konstantinidis 1978: 26–27;
29–30). This is the core of Konstantinidis’s regional
modernism, which attempts to bring together ecumenically ‘true’
principles with regional specificities.

Perhaps the most important of Konstantinidis’s initial attempts to communicate
his work to a global audience is the first English-language publication of the
Weekend House in World Architecture 2 (Donat 1965: 128–131)7
(Fig. 2). According to its main editor, John
Donat, the World Architecture series ‘aims and objects
[…] to bridge the gap between architects and people and to provide a platform
for the confrontation of ideas between a new generation and the established
masters.’ It therefore intends to operate as ‘a forum for ideas’:
‘World Architecture is more concerned with why we build
and what we build than with how we build it. […] [T]he real issues are
philosophical, not technological; not how to build but what to build’ (Donat 1965: 8–9). As promised by the
title of the series, the architecture of the world is contained in volumes of 210
pages that are more or less equally shared by the eighteen hosted countries, as
represented by their specific contributing editors. It is on the pages of such a
publication, then, that Konstantinidis attempts his major breakthrough to a
potentially global audience; and it is his photographs of the Weekend House in
Anavyssos that illustrate his first foray into this global forum, with his manifesto
on dwelling. Notably, his main text does not contain a single line on the house that
is supposedly presented on the same pages; nor is there any direct link or comment
on the illustrations.8 It is therefore the first
time that this house is projected as an emblematic image within his oeuvre. It
represents his built manifesto9 on the
primordial essence of architecture: minimal dwelling in an unadulterated native
landscape. As a model for his overarching vision, the Weekend House lends its
material support to his main theoretical arguments. It is his already materialised
reply to the main question posed by the editor, ‘Why do we build?’ The
combination of the photographs of the Weekend House with this general text allows
them to become iconic in a way ‘close to the religious sense: not merely a
picture of architecture, but architecture itself. […] They are heroic: a
world-view polemic offered in a single frame’ (Rattenbury 2002: 57, 59).

Fig. 2

The Weekend House in Anavyssos illustrates Aris Konstantinidis’s
architectural manifesto, here published in World Architecture
2, by Donat (1965:
128–131). Reproduced with permission of Dimitris
Konstantinidis.

Only three years earlier, in 1962, Konstantinidis had employed a similar publishing
strategy for the first monographic presentation of his work to appear in a Greek
journal of architecture (Ζυγός). This was
also the year he began working on his Weekend House in Anavyssos project. In this
Greek journal, Konstantinidis introduces his work by sharing his reflections on
architecture in general. He doesn’t need to refer to any of his buildings in
particular, since ‘every work of architecture reflects, along with the
specific economic and technical life of a certain age, man himself out of place and
time’ (Konstantinidis 1962: 27). Thus
his introductory text has a lot in common with his text for the publication of the
Weekend House in Anavyssos in World Architecture 2 three years
later. In the final instance, these two very different publications essentially
share the same text; they are nothing more than slight variations on the same theme,
alternative articulations of the same fundamental propositions. By effectively
rendering one (essentially the same) text relevant both to the general sum of his
work and to a particular building of his, Konstantinidis ascribes the role of
quintessential embodiment of his architecture to the Weekend House in Anavyssos.

In his 1962 text, the architect mentions that ‘this publication does not
include [u]nrealised works and studies, nor projects that are currently under
construction but have not yet been completed’ (Konstantinidis 1962: 27). In other words, and for the purposes of the
Greek monographic presentation, the Weekend House in Anavyssos does not
exist in 1962. That is to say, it does not exist before being
photographed by its own architect. It will come to exist only according to the will
of its auteur, and only through his own photographic lens. This is
clearly a subsequent building process that takes its own time. Notably, the Weekend
House is still missing from the 1964 monographic presentation of Aris
Konstantinidis’s work in Architectural Design, a whole two
years later.10 Thus, the actual moment of birth
of the building is not the final moment of its construction process, but the moment
of its first photo-shoot. Konstantinidis could have presented drawings of the
building at its final stage of construction — even if it was not finished at
the time of printing — but he chose not to do so. Under this light, the
characteristic motto he repeated tirelessly (‘I find the solution in
situ’), along with his denial of the existence of any in-progress
drawings of an ongoing design process (since the solution is single — the one
that has already been found during a visit to the site and not on the drawing
board)11 acquire a very special meaning.
By, quite literally, ‘building’ the photograph of his work on the site,
Konstantinidis offers a retrospective validation of his own words. He is in absolute
control of the game of publication, since its rules are only set, defined, and
defied by himself at his own will.

Never does he expose the mechanisms that generate his buildings in the sites he
visits. Remaining consistent with his words, his buildings are instead presented as
‘growing from’ the ground through his photographs. Since there is no
room for the drawing board in his publications, Konstantinidis could even assert
that these photographs are exact replicas of the images that sprang to his mind,
indeed, as he was sitting from ‘this to that stone’ in the site,
attempting to find the solution. And, paradoxically, he would not be lying. It is
precisely those published photographs that play the role of ‘first
sketches’. That is to say, his photos are constructed in a way that best
demonstrates the architectural qualities that primarily concern him. These qualities
include the atmosphere of a space; the kind of dwelling encouraged by those spaces;
the attempt to link indoor and outdoor space as a single ‘organic
entity’ (Konstantinidis 1964: 212); the
clear articulation of the building structure; the rhythmic steps of the grid in his
façades; etc. His writings on design are rife with repetitions of the assertion
that the façade is ‘automatically’ generated by the actual
development of the plan and the section drawings (see, for instance, Konstantinidis 1992c: 116). Although he almost
never published plan and section drawings, in the rare occasions he has to do so (as
in Wolgensinger and Debaigts 1968:
146–912), there is no way his
section drawing can straightforwardly and unambiguously lead to a single final form
of a façade. Thus his usual publication practices end up obscuring an important
stage of the design process and surround his actual design craft with an aura of
mystery (that special halo usually reserved for the rare genius). By referring only
to data provided in his own publications, it is possible to infer that, even when he
worked on a two-dimensional plan drawing, Konstantinidis was in fact designing in
three dimensions, by simultaneously processing the section drawing. His vehicle for
doing that was his proposed grid for the standardisation of construction —
which was indeed crystallised at that very moment in his drawings for the Weekend
House in Anavyssos. Thus, his design process was actually driven by
three-dimensional objects: he could ‘see’ the walls rising and creating
their own rhythms in space at the exact moment he worked on the plan drawing. If
that is indeed the case, then it is not only the façade but also the section
drawing that he drew simultaneously alongside the plan drawing; and all of the above
in turn take place within a holistic conception of the building through its
constitutive three-dimensional orthogonal grid.

As already noted, the architect rarely commented on his specific works in
publications. On the few occasions he did so, his account is minimal, almost
downright descriptive. Maybe that is because he knew that his words could not follow
his buildings exclusively forever. If that is indeed the case, then this is also why
he instead reformulated his general manifesto, each and every time he published his
work (covering such themes as what is architecture, how we should be building and
living both today and tomorrow, etc.). The primary function of his texts is not to
present his specific buildings but rather to shape a framework for interpreting his
images in the way he intended, without ever referring directly to them. In an era
that still considers the photograph an indisputable document that
‘captures’ the real, Konstantinidis used photography precisely to
eradicate the real through his own mediation. By insisting on photographing his own
buildings himself, he actually initiated a process of total control that has imposed
a dominant gaze on his work — his own gaze. This was mainly attained through
his photographic monopoly of a privileged moment in time (that can never be
retrieved by the future historian in another form). The architect’s own
testimony of the embryonic stage of the building is both historically unique and
irrevocably exclusive.

It is shocking to realise that Konstantinidis’s visual monopoly of his work
lasted as long as it has; it would be twenty more years before the building was
finally photographed in another way. This time, the eye behind the camera belonged
to Dimitris Philippidis. The first ever photographs of the Weekend House in
Anavyssos, shot from different angles, thus offering different views, by a different
photographer, are published on the pages of what still remains the most
comprehensive history of architecture in modern Greece (Philippidis 1984: 370–1 and 424). Indeed, one of the main
reasons why Philippidis’s
Nεοελληνική
Αρχιτεκτονική
of 1984 stands apart from similar or more limited historical endeavours (apart from
its significance for boldly accepting the challenge of covering an immense
bibliographical gap in modern Greek architectural literature), is the author’s
own insistence on visiting — and, whenever possible, photographing again
— more than half of the buildings presented on its pages.

1984–2001: A published life in the shadow of Aris Konstantinidis

Not coincidentally, a few years later, in 1997, Philippidis also attempted an
overview of the way in which Konstantinidis photographed his own buildings for his
publications. Beginning by remarking that we know Konstantinidis’s work
‘only through his own eyes’ (Philippidis
1997: 57), Philippidis observes that the architect’s photographs
are almost always frontal (indeed, they echo façade drawings); and even on the
rare occasions they are not, they are only one-point perspectives.13 Philippidis also traces the fundamental
constituents of Konstantinidis’s architectural gaze by reflecting on various
aspects of his photographic practices, from his preferred viewing angles and
framings to the details he chooses to isolate inside or outside his buildings.
Philippidis shows that in Konstantinidis’s photographs of indoor spaces, the
architect pursued ‘richness in oppositional elements’, in terms of both
lightness and texture or volume, to produce a ‘replete’ image. He finds
the architect to be unexpectedly ‘sensitive’ and ‘earthly’,
a ‘luscious organiser of space’ (Philippidis 1997: 58).

Philippidis’s choice to photograph the building anew for his 1984 publication
therefore appears to be deliberate, indeed; it is an exercise in reception. In the
early 1980s, perhaps unconsciously, Philippidis moves away from some of the features
he later went on to systematise as constitutive elements of a Konstantinidean gaze.
Indeed, the photos he publishes are two-point perspectives,14 offering two entirely different framings of the same side of
the building. They can therefore be read in a dialectical relation with
Konstantinidis’s own original photos (Fig. 3). Aside from revealing their apparent distance in time,
Philippidis’s photos also offer new aspects of the same building. The view of
the Weekend House from the seaside clearly stands out, since it reveals the
‘back side’ of its most published photo. While Konstantinidis’s
original photograph accentuates the way in which the Weekend House is
‘macroscopically’ inscribed to the landscape (as viewed from
Athinon-Souniou Avenue), Philippidis presents the ‘microscopic’ version
of the same theme, revealing the minutiae of the building’s relation to its
immediate environment. Philippidis’s second photograph in turn echoes
Konstantinidis’s original framing of the side view of the building, from a
viewing angle that stresses its harmonic relation with the defining outline of the
natural landscape. In Philippidis’s photograph, the theme seems to be defined
by its background. During the two decades between the two publications, a large part
of the hill was eventually covered with two-storey houses whose architecture is
clearly not in line with Konstantinidis’s own conception of dwelling. The
original shot in the early 1980s thus becomes almost a testimony of the
architect’s polemical isolation from the majority of contemporaneous
production of the built environment in a rapidly modernising Greece. For it was
precisely in the early 1980s when a retired and increasingly disappointed
Konstantinidis began to believe that his vision for a ‘true’
architecture that sustains authentic dwelling was perhaps unattainable, bound to
remain in the realm of the ideal — or, indeed, only hinted at through his
idyllic photographs.

In addition to Philippidis’s general reflections about Konstantinidis’s
photographs, I note that Konstantinidis never photographed the same space twice.
Slight modifications in the arrangement of furniture and quotidian objects that
travel from one photograph of the Weekend House to the next, from one niche to
another shelf on the stone walls, reveal his deliberate flexibility in the use of
such details. His photographs trace or narrate acts of a Konstantinidean dwelling
— and these are the photos that are printed, large scale, right after his
short manifesto of this dwelling in World Architecture 2 (Donat 1965: 130–131) (Fig. 2). His photographs are therefore prescriptive:
not limited to depicting, their actual emphasis is on making something happen. It is
as if the textual is immediately followed by a visual architectural manifesto. It is
significant to note that the readers never see any other indoor space of the Weekend
House, aside from the living room. Whatever lies behind the fireplace, as well as
the fourth façade, presumably rest in the limbo of architectural publication.
There is a very strong possibility that the darker private sleeping zone, that forms
the enclosed core of the Weekend House in Anavyssos, has never been photographed;
and that is because this house is intended to narrate another kind of story. Despite
its oft-used name (and probably against the wishes of Panayotis Papapanayotou, the
original owner of the house, and his own aspirations), in Konstantinidis’s
mind this house is not intended to host idle vacationers and lavish dinner parties.
In the somewhat sparse and minimal descriptive accounts of the Weekend House in his
publications (Donat 1965: 131; Wolgensinger and Debaigts 1968: 146; Konstantinidis 1971: 34), Konstantinidis is
quite clear about his vision of the ideal life. The Weekend House attempts to
discourage a quietist or escapist proposal of mere sleeping and relaxing indoors:
‘The interior furnishings were reduced to a minimum as life is primarily
directed towards the sea’ (Wolgensinger and
Debaigts 1968: 146). Indeed, the architect seems to suggest that sleeping
should probably take place in the living room, especially since its ‘sliding
doors [can open] onto the veranda’ and the ‘sofas [can] also [be] used
for beds’ (Donat 1965: 131). Precisely
because the Weekend House is designed to organise the landscape ‘not as an
image, but as a living space’, ‘as an architectural space […]
integrating the exterior and interior into one space’ (Konstantinidis 1964: 212), his emphasis is always on the
‘semi-open living area’. ‘[P]rotect[ing] the interior from the
afternoon sun’ (Konstantinidis 1971:
34), Konstantinidis envisioned his architecture as enabling man to live with
nature even in ‘an arid and harsh landscape on the Athens to Sounion
road’ (Wolgensinger and Debaigts 1968:
146). The primary function of the Weekend House is therefore the
celebration of dwelling under a roof that remains in integrated harmony with the
natural landscape during the course of the day.15

Konstantinidis’s photographs are usually published in grayscale.16 While this is one of the most common tricks of
the trade in the profession — many architects often resort to the power of
grayscale tones to reconcile existing antinomies of colour between their buildings
and their immediate surroundings — Konstantinidis’s work does not need
it. The enhanced impression usually created through grayscale photographs feels
almost like an unnecessary luxury; his Weekend House in Anavyssos establishes its
own harmonic integration in the landscape in full colour. Seemingly aware of this,
Konstantinidis republished this photograph in full colour in his 1981 publication,
Projects and Buildings, and spread it over two pages in the
catalogue accompanying the monographic exhibition of his work in the Greek National
Gallery in 1989.17 Whenever he published the
plan of the Weekend House, the drawing is intended as a mental map for navigating
the building through its photographs. Yet again, the photos show that the
arrangement of furniture and other mobile objects in the house proposed in the
drawing is not identical with that in the photos. The insistence on photographing
the building aims to prove it is alive; that this kind of architecture is not yet
another ‘cardboard castle’ (Godoli 1986:
110–112). If it is the Konstantinidean way of life that must be the
primary feature in the photos, then there is no need to ‘stage’ the
Weekend House in exactly the same way it is ‘staged’ in the plan
drawing. Even if it is clear there is enough space for a big table under the roof,
there is no need for it to be there in the photographs, as well: two chairs are just
enough for one to ‘sit in the shadow looking at the sea’ (Donat 1965: 131).

However, in the final instance, the Weekend House is nothing more than a one to one
scale model that is now rooted in its natural landscape — because no one ever
adopted the model of dwelling it was designed, let alone photographed, to
project.18 ‘Two years after it was
completed [the Weekend House] was sold to the scion of a family of ship owners and
art collectors. It was downgraded to become a tool deposit for the large and
ungainly villa that was built next to it and that now towers over it’ (Cofano 2011: 121). In terms of importance, the
photographs clearly prevail over the building and its originally intended function
as a physical structure. Virtually inaccessible, the actual house is reduced to
functioning as a distant, idealised model of a certain practice to architectural
pilgrimage visitors. By emancipating the image from any possible external reference,
the recent ‘postmodern’ debate on photography emphasises its possibility
to simply refer to other images, or even exclusively to itself (see Stavridis 2006). Thus, the most published image
of the Weekend House blending with the landscape is an image type, a sort of logo
for the Konstantinidean architecture of minimal dwelling within the unadulterated
Greek landscape. However, the side function of this image is also the condensation
and simultaneous refutation of the actual tempo of human behaviour. It is this very
image that renders Konstantinidis’s architecture and his proposed mode of
dwelling timeless. The photograph lends its perceived reality to an ideal of
dwelling that never existed in practice. Thus Konstantinidis’s deliberate
avoidance of any dramatic photographs of the house, such as from bold or unusual
viewing angles, reinforces the impression that his main intention was to retain the
highest possible pictorial fidelity with the spatial reality before him.

That Konstantinidis loved photography is no secret. He is therefore in a position to
know what is actually at stake in his photographic practice. By freezing the
‘privileged’ moment, his photographs ensure the perpetuation of the
architect’s vision. Future researchers might only be able to photograph his
buildings as ruins (for example, Papaoikonomou
2013); they might also use those photographs to develop their
architectural vision of their own present — in much the same way
Konstantinidis himself actually did during his numerous photographic expeditions
around Greece (see Konstantinidis 1975; 1992b). Resorting to photography in order to
capture what he will later go on to perceive as the essence of selected vernacular
constructions and ruins from the architectural past of his home country,
Konstantinidis subsequently evokes many of these photographs as the foundations for
‘vertically erecting’ his own architectural thesis. The crucial
difference here is the fact that his own vision, both for architecture in general
and for his works in particular, will have also survived through his own
photographs, thus ‘contaminating’ any future gaze directed towards the
ruin of his architecture. That is why it is essential to understand that his
theoretical texts on photography do not comprise general or neutral remarks, as
their reader might initially think, but form an additional layer of mediation
— an additional mechanism of building reception. They suggest the intended
interpretation of the architect’s own photographs. In other words, the gaze of
the architect is being emphatically re-imposed upon a photograph that embodies, and
has already recorded, his own gaze towards his building.19

In his 1955 text titled ‘The Art of Photography’ (later included in Konstantinidis 198420), Konstantinidis understands photography as an artistic
composition. It is the outcome produced by a peculiar vision that is able to see and
distinguish certain qualities within the visual field. He concludes his text by
stressing the fact that ‘the photographic lens […] represents and
records on pure film […] the objective image of the world, the true form of
things’ (Konstantinidis 1984: 112). In
other words, it is the vision of the photographer Aris Konstantinidis that speaks
the truth — and not everyman’s eyes, which might look, but certainly
don’t see. By rendering himself an authority in a visual field that can
potentially be photographed in his own way, he simultaneously imposes his own gaze
as objective, par excellence. While his photographs are clearly his
own ‘designs with light’, they also manage to reveal the
‘true’ essence of his architecture. Just like his photographs, his ideas
are constantly reproduced and reiterated. In one of his later texts (also
republished in Konstantinidis 198421), he stresses the primacy of the individual
subject behind the photographic lens that cannot but be ‘objective in
recording reality’. The creative combination of these two factors leads
through ‘qualitative abstractions’ to an ‘objectivity elevated to
the status of art and a photographic image that is rich in spiritual and artistic
content’ (Konstantinidis 1984:
299–300). Several years later, he writes that whenever he
photographs his own buildings, he avoids any kind of ‘beautification’,
in order to present them ‘as they really stood on the real landscape’.
However, at the same time he also acknowledges that his photo-shoot is a kind of
‘rebuilding’ that makes the building his own again (Konstantinidis 1992c: 341–342).

Taken all together, these theoretical texts on photography by the architect reveal an
unavoidable tension between the objectivity of the lens and the subjectivity of the
gaze behind it. However, Konstantinidis always resolves this tension in a way that
leads to the true image of ‘one world’ in its ‘true
essence’. In the photograph taken by the architect himself, therefore, his
built work is inextricably imbued with his own theory. And that is why the text that
accompanies the publication doesn’t really need to directly refer to the
building presented. This — only apparently missing — text is the
photograph itself. It is clear that the standard publications of the Weekend House
gain their strength by their focus on Konstantinidis’s photographs. This dual
focus on the photograph-as-narrative, along with the text-as-an-architectural
manifesto, defines the Weekend House in Anavyssos as an emblematic presence within
Konstantinidis’s work. The global reception of the Weekend House and the way
in which it has since appeared in a wide array of architectural literature22 indicates the nomadic emancipation of an
image-symbol that Konstantinidis himself built as an architect of his own
publications; that is to say, as an architect of his own reception.

One recent study stands out in the pool of global reception of the Weekend House.
David Leatherbarrow (2000) devotes
twenty-five pages of text and photographs to this house — far more pages than
the architect himself ever devoted to it. Hence, Leatherbarrow’s is the most
comprehensive published account of the building so far. Of special interest in his
own gaze towards the building is a discernible tension. As a philosophically
predisposed architect, but also as an exterior and distant observer of architecture
in modern Greece, he attempts to position himself within the Konstantinidean
viewpoint, albeit only partially — that is, without going as far as
eradicating this distance altogether.

In Leatherbarrow’s book, Konstantinidis’s original photographs alternate
with more recent ones by Marina Lathouri, offering a clear reflection of the fragile
balance Leatherbarrow’s ‘third man’ gaze intends to strike (Fig.
4). The degree of disengagement he can
retain paves the way for a stochastic navigation of the building that discerns
certain, seemingly already anticipated, phenomenological qualities. Is this balance
really attained? Can it be verified? Let us consider Leatherbarrow’s focus on
the fireplace, for instance: ‘the fireplace stands in the middle of the
house’s public spaces, dividing the kitchen from the living room, also
anchoring the dining table’ (Leatherbarrow
2000: 213). By regarding it as the main point of articulation of all the
conflicting forces, the node of fundamental discontinuities — private-public,
inside-outside, light-shadow, nature-artifice, etc. — he elevates it to the
role of an absolutely central spot of the Weekend House, a condenser of its total
meaning. Even with this seemingly original insight, though, Leatherbarrow does not
break completely free from Konstantinidis’s gaze. To start with, the fireplace
had already been widely published by the architect himself — even in isolation
from the rest of the building (as in Wanetschek,
Meier-Menzel and Hierl 1967: 52, and Barran 1976: 81). In addition, Leatherbarrow’s main argument rests
upon his observations of Konstantinidis’s own photograph of the living room
(Leatherbarrow 2000: 226) — noting,
for instance, that the surface panel of the dining table is aligned with the
lowermost and longest mark of the mantelpiece (which in turn coincides with the
height of the kitchen worktable). Meanwhile, Marina Lathouri’s photographs are
merely present, included but never commented upon, in the main text. Equally
revealing is the position of the Weekend House within Leatherbarrow’s wider
study of ‘uncommon ground’ (Leatherbarrow 2000: 203–227). Konstantinidis’s Weekend House
serves as a vehicle of transition between the two concluding themes of the book: the
role of spatial discontinuity in the formation of the interior and exterior of
architecture and the subsequent significance of the function of the point of
articulation — i.e., whether the building serves as an interiority that stems
from its exterior (Leatherbarrow 2000: 196;
Leatherbarrow uses an excerpt from Konstantinidis (1975)) or as an updating of the topographical (that is, both spatial and
temporal) discontinuous horizon of the site. In light of these remarks, one is left
wondering whether the last word of the book actually belongs to Konstantinidis,
rather than Leatherbarrow. However far away from Konstantinidis’s original
questions Leatherbarrow may have strayed by following his own phenomenological trail
of thinking,23 he still selects from an
extensive body of work the Weekend House in Anavyssos as his main reference. His is
yet another instance that documents the extent to which the Weekend House is
received almost unquestionably as an emblematic presence within
Konstantinidis’s architectural oeuvre.

Fig. 4

The Weekend House in Anavyssos as it appears in Leatherbarrow (2000), through the lenses of Aris
Konstantinidis and Marina Lathouri. Reproduced with permission of MIT Press,
Dimitris Konstantinidis, and Marina Lathouri.

Repeated publications of the same photographs thus end up defining the gaze of the
external observer, too. The eye of this observer acquires a vision that almost
abandons perception in favour of the architect’s original conception. This is
particularly evident in the series of documentary films about architecture in modern
Greece that were produced and broadcast on Hellenic Public Television in 1990. In
the short clips from the Weekend House in Anavyssos, none of these video recordings
attempt to produce a different experience of the building. This is particularly
striking when one considers the potential for the video-camera to recreate, for
instance, the experience of navigating the house in real time. Instead, all the
clips of the Weekend House follow the logic of the static framing of an already
published photograph. The video-camera remains stable and the only sense of movement
allowed is the one provided by the mechanics of zooming in and zooming out. The
framing is essentially photographic, rather than cinematic, the movement artificial,
implicitly guided by views in photographs already published by other architects
(Fig. 5, top). What the viewer ends up watching
is the reduction of the cinematic scene to its photographic background — a
return to its generating mechanism. The camera is indeed recording the double return
of Konstantinidis’s photographs. The video footage produced is nothing more
than a photograph squared. It is as if the Weekend House stands there to be filmed
in the same way it has already been photographed. Perhaps it is not irrelevant to
note that one of the two directors, Georgios Papakonstantinou, is also an
architect.

The subsequent documentary film from 2001 by the Hellenic Public Television about
Konstantinidis is a landmark moment (Karakasis
2001). With this film, the circle of people close to the architect have
begun to speak in their own voices, although they still try to maintain their
connection with his original intentions. This circle of people now seems ready to
start revealing the cards Konstantinidis had always held close to his chest. For
instance, even though the film does not provide any new video footage from the
Weekend House, it does show some of the photographs the architect never published,
from the personal archive he actively and systematically built, alongside his line
of publications. These include views of the missing fourth façade of the
building, as well as some collages that offer a depiction of the building in the
manner of artistic drawing practices (Fig. 5,
bottom). Instead of reciting from Konstantinidis’s own texts, the slideshow of
these images is accompanied by different voices whose views on the building do not
necessarily correspond with that of the architect. Hence, this film historically
initiates a new process of separating Konstantinidis’s words from his
photographs. It might well mark the advent of a broader attempt to secure a distance
from his dominant gaze and produce novel interpretations, or at least register
digressing instances of his buildings’ historical reception. It definitively
marks a threshold moment in time. In this 2001 film, both the architect’s
sister, Elli, and the hotel owner of Xenia Mykonos guide viewers through
Konstantinidis’s buildings, followed by a camera that has finally left behind
the logic of a static photographic framing, which is a reproduction of the
master’s vision behind it, for good. Perhaps it is not irrelevant to note that
this time the film director, Apostolos Karakasis, is not an architect.

2001–2014: A life published without Aris Konstantinidis

At the end of this trajectory, the digital presence of the Weekend House in Anavyssos
under the gaze of its architect already has its own history. Back in 2008, a Google
search for the Weekend House in Anavyssos would return the right results, along with
the photographs that have been repeatedly reproduced by the architect himself (Fig.
6). And only six years ago, when the
digital service of Google Books was still active on a much larger scale, it was
possible to browse, for free, the pages of Leatherbarrow’s Uncommon
Ground, for instance. Quite ironically, though, the complications of
image copyright meant that the only new photographs of the Weekend House included in
the hard copy of the book were not digitally available. That in turn meant that
Konstantinidis’s gaze toward his own architectural work would remain dominant
even in the age of digital reproduction and global distribution of images a whole
fifteen years after his death. Rather astonishingly, this was all happening in a
medium that was definitely out of his historical league, and over which he could
scarcely have exerted any control. The fact that the choices he made about
publishing his work are reflected even in their contemporary presence in the digital
world is further indication of Konstantinidis’s indisputable success in
building his own reception. Unlike Dimitris Pikionis, Konstantinidis was never
followed by a broad circle of family members, friends, former students, and
colleagues who might foster the posthumous publication and further dissemination of
his own work.24 He was therefore solely
responsible for the survival of his own myth. This is naturally reflected in the
history of the digital presence of the two architects’ works on the internet.
For instance, Konstantinidis’s entry in Wikipedia was non-existent until 2009,
while Pikionis’s had been there already for at least three years. Things are
different in 2014. A Google search for the Weekend House in Anavyssos not only
returns the right results, but also some photographs from Konstantinidis’s
archive that had never appeared in print,25 as
well as some of the subsequent photographs by Dimitris Philippidis and Marina
Lathouri (even though the photo credits are not always accurate). In 2008, the image
that welcomed visitors to the website of the Association of Greek Architects was a
combination of the works of three major Greek architects: the Weekend House in
Anavyssos by Aris Konstantinidis, Dimitris Pikionis’s work on the hills of
Acropolis and Philopappou and Takis Zenetos’s open-air theatre in Lycabettus.
The three together could well be read as a logo of architecture in modern Greece,
since it more or less summarises an established view of these architects and their
works.

Fig. 6

Instances from a published life in the era of digital reproduction
(2001–2012): Results from Google searches of Aris Konstantinidis, and
the House in Anavyssos in February 2008 (top and middle left); Aris
Konstantinidis lacking a Wikipedia page until 2009 (top right); Marina
Lathouri’s photographs not accessible due to copyright restrictions in
Google Books, 2008 (middle right); the Association of Greek Architects logo,
including Konstantinidis’s House in Anavyssos, acts as an emblem of
modern Greek architecture (bottom left); previously unpublished photographs
from Aris Konstantinidis’s personal archive appear on the Internet in
2012 (bottom right). Reproduced with permission of Dimitris
Konstantinidis.

The fact that the dwelling captured in the photographs of the Weekend House was for a
life that was never actually lived by anyone has not stopped the house from
retaining its emblematic place within Konstantinidis’s oeuvre. As an architect
who adopted a strongly polemical stance throughout his lifetime, Konstantinidis
could only aim at the proselyte inhabitant of his architecture. In that sense, he is
deeply modernist; he is leading the way towards a ‘true’ architecture.
The problem is that very few seem to follow. Unlike Le Corbusier, Konstantinidis
never worked with clients whose ‘goals […] were thoroughly entwined with
[his] theories’, willing to identify ‘their own unconventional lives
with architecture that was avant-garde’ and actually ‘enjoy[ing] the
role of modern occupants in an ideal environment’ (Friedman 2006: 16, 24, 116). On the contrary, for
Konstantinidis, clients ‘often became the main personification of the forces
opposing him […] He describes how he struggled for the survival and
realisation of his ideas, despite the obstacles and traps that his clients set for
him’ (Magouliotis 2012: 158). That does
not necessarily mean that Le Corbusier was never at odds even with some of his most
ideal clients, of course. ‘When he published his work, he preferred to show
the rooms completely empty or as settings for evocative, dreamlike tableaux
suggesting absence rather than the presence of real-life occupants with their own
tastes and preferences’ (Friedman 2006:
119). Konstantinidis’s similar publishing strategy is just another
aspect of his persona as a quintessentially modernist architect; nevertheless, his
modernism is still regional.

Konstantinidis never built a project outside Greece, so his proposed regional
modernism never encountered circumstances that might have provided a more nuanced
understanding of it. As he allegedly asserted, in line with the fundamental
principles of his regional modernist credo, his being Greek was enough to prevent
him from building in Zurich. Yet it was not enough to prevent him from teaching
there for three consecutive academic years (1967–1970). Since the specific
degree to which the architect should remain sensitive to local specificities, from
materials to climatic conditions, is not clearly defined in his texts,
Konstantinidis’s Swiss students’ projects, which were also included in
his private archive (still inaccessible to the public), acquire an increased
significance for contemporary architectural historians. They might well offer the
clearest practical insights into the specific features — and limits — of
his regional modernism. Only after examining them could one further understand
whether Konstantinidis himself, regardless of his writings, and especially in his
post-1960s residential projects, has gradually built his own version of a modernist
passe-partout ‘winebox’ — replicated, with
minimum variation, all over Greece (see Konstantinidis 1989: 68–9); in other words, a version of what he
otherwise loved to loath in the work of Le Corbusier (who apparently had the
audacity to propose building twenty replicas of Villa Savoye in Argentina). However,
even if one would agree that Konstantinidis, like an involuntary alter-ego of Le
Corbusier, was also building ‘wineboxes’ all over Greece, the two
architects’ conceptions of place and nature are fundamentally different.
Colomina argues, beginning with ‘the modern function of the window’
— to offer the frame for a view to nature — that in the works of Le
Corbusier, nature becomes an artifice to be viewed by the eye of the house, which is
actually the eye of a camera, a classifying mechanism. In this case, dwelling is in
fact the domestication of a picture of nature; and the modernist architect
challenges the traditional notion of place (Colomina
1994: 301–326). In Konstantinidis’s case, dwelling is the
domestication of nature itself. Where, according to Colomina, Le Corbusier builds in
order to mediate nature, Konstantinidis builds so that nature itself can become an
unmediated space for living; here, the concept of place retains its much more
conventional sense.

Konstantinidis often criticises the work of other architects — including such
prominent figures of the modernist canon as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. He
would probably agree with James M. Richards’s insight that ‘[m]odernist
architecture however correct, however appropriate it may have been, becomes an
imposition […] if it is not related to people’s own sympathies and
passions. Only by making a relationship to existing systems of belief can it hope to
become part of a legitimate tradition’ (Higgott 2007: 54). Around the same time that Richards was publishing and
writing his Castles on the Ground in 1946, Konstantinidis was surveying the vernacular, anonymous
architecture of ‘old’ Athens and Mykonos, ‘argu[ing] that only if
an architect becomes “one” with “the
people”/laòs might he understand the
“truth” about building’ (Theocharopoulou 2010: 121).26 That
is clearly his regional side; but it is directly followed by his modernist side of
the perceptive architect who has to lead the way: ‘you have to become
laòs yourself first before you can show others what is
valuable from your own people’ (Konstantinidis
1950: 26). This reveals probably the most significant tension within
Konstantinidis’s own work. His contact with rural folklore might be
symptomatic of his attempt to bridge his didactic modernism with the already
legitimate regional tradition of living in the Greek landscape. This might well be
his only way of staying in touch with the people’s own sympathies and
passions. Although he is often perceived as offering the most ‘ascetic’
or ‘purist’ version of modernism in Greece (Tsakopoulos 2014: 120, 185), Konstantinidis’s
architectural practice might have eventually failed to be more pervasive, precisely
because he was never absolutely modern himself. That is to say, his constant return
to folklore as a founding and legitimising force for his proposed model of almost
primitive life in the pristine Greek environment might well have meant that he was
not the modern man of the immediate present, keeping up with a society that was
gradually undergoing a significant process of modernised change. That is why the
interplay between high and low culture in the work of Konstantinidis is so different
from the one found in Colomina’s Le Corbusier. The latter enthusiastically
embraced mass culture as a source of architectural inspiration, for ‘this
contemporary style was to be found precisely in the everyday object and the
industrial product, that is, in the unselfconscious anonymous design […] For
Le Corbusier, concerned with the everyday, the new style is everywhere and precisely
for that reason difficult to discern’ (Colomina 1994: 202). Konstantinidis’s quest for the everyday was
of a radically different sort. Although still difficult to discern, the
long-forgotten authentic way of life in the Greek landscape was certainly not to be
found through the same Corbusian ‘full engagement’ with mass media and
the culture industry (Colomina 1994: 107); it
had to be retrieved from essentially traditional forms of life — and then of
course, be realigned with the modern, but also timeless (and rather crucially so),
‘spirit of construction’ (Konstantinidis
1964: 212). The perceived archetypal timelessness of this spirit allows
Konstantinidis to combine both his modernist and his regional concerns in a single
unified gaze. By combining these concerns, however, Konstantinidis found himself in
the peculiar and isolating position of having to fight simultaneously on all fronts,
since his work was actually threatened on all sides (both from contemporaneous
forward-looking ‘international-style’ modernists and the
backward-looking regional ‘traditionalists’). It is perhaps this
ambivalent hostility — and the aggressively defensive stance that had to go
with it — that renders Konstantinidis’s case unique in creating a zone
of non-intervention around his work through his absolutely total control of his
publishing practices.27 Toward the end of his
days, though, what he used to call ‘elements for self-knowledge’ (i.e.,
his own architectural lessons from the native vernacular) appear as increasingly
meaningful only to himself (see Konstantinidis
1992c: 116, 171, 234).28 In an
ironic turn of events, his cherished ‘vessels of life’ end up becoming
sites of architectural pilgrimage visits. Thus Konstantinidis unexpectedly ends up
full circle meeting Colomina’s Le Corbusier again. The crucial difference is
that with Le Corbusier, resorting to the visitor is a deliberate act in an
orchestrated attempt to displace the humanist subject (Colomina 1994: 326–327).29

But, of course, if his ‘vessels of life’ have now turned into sites of
architectural pilgrimage visits, then Konstantinidis was definitely not talking only
to himself. As the documented global reception of his Weekend House in Anavyssos
shows, the architectural community was indeed listening. If Garry Stevens is right
to assert that the voluminous Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects,
which includes an entry on Konstantinidis (Placzek
1982: 578), ‘serves quite well to define the canon of the [global
architectural] field as the field saw itself in the late 1970s’ (Stevens 1998: 127), then Konstantinidis was
already an established member of the global architectural canon around the moment of
his retirement. His regional modernism will not need to be
‘rediscovered’ in the future by someone like Pierluigi Serraino, who
asserts that it is only the photographs and their repeated publication that ensure a
building its place in architectural discourse and history (Serraino 2000: 6).30
‘When architects try to bring their work to the attention of the large-scale
community,’ Serraino continues, ‘their chances of leaving a permanent
mark on the mind of the reader depend on: 1) Architectural Photographers; 2)
Editorial Policy; 3) Mass-media Coverage’ (Serraino 2000: 7). He was an avid photographer, and he was also a
frequent editor of his own published works, so Konstantinidis only fell short in the
category of mass-media coverage, which may well be an additional reason why his
vision was not as pervasive outside expert architectural circles. Within those
circles, however, the contemporary problem is precisely the opposite.

2014 and beyond: Aris Konstantinidis’s architectural persona behind the
veil of its published life

The contemporary problem concerning Konstantinidis and his current historical
reception within architectural circles is his nearly ubiquitous presence; the
echoing sound of a lonely and polemic voice that cannot easily accommodate novel
interpretations of his work. His own gaze attempted to collect and control the sum
of possible interpretations — as well as predefine the terms under which they
could be considered valid or not.31 In a world
he increasingly perceived as hostile, his last resort was to ensure at least the
purity of his crystallised architectural vision (see Magouliotis 2012: 160). Thus a critical survey of the published life of
his work could only hope to reveal the gaps that would in turn form the entry points
for a new kind of reception. This seems to be the major task of contemporary
architectural historians who wish to revisit Konstantinidis’s works.

This task is even more significant when one understands that, behind his imposing
presence, the architect himself remains an open-ended riddle. A crucial question
that is often overlooked follows from the fact that from the moment that
Konstantinidis decisively enters the sphere of architectural publicity, he
consistently presents himself as already possessing a certain persona. He always
keeps his cards close to his chest, careful not to provide hints that might lead his
readers to the processes behind the development of his work or himself. In that
sense, it might well be that Konstantinidis’s recurring portrayal as a recluse
idealist with a ‘severely judgemental and often aggressive’ (Magouliotis 2012: 157) attitude to his fellow
citizens’ way of life is another manifestation of his enduring stronghold and
tacit control over the imagination of contemporary architectural historians. This
increasingly dominant portrayal is mainly inferred from his late writings, the
majority of which were indeed written, edited, and published over the last fifteen
years of his life. Architecturally inactive and retired by then, Konstantinidis
seems to have become even more self-absorbed and disappointed with the prevailing
tendencies of a world he gradually felt he could no longer belong to (see Konstantinidis 1992c). However, while this may
be true, by no means must it also signal the end of the story. Why do architectural
historians have to pay blind obedience to his retrospective accounts and the
distortions those might well entail? Magouliotis rightly notes that ‘most of
what [Konstantinidis] was hired to design was in fact commissioned by the state or a
state-run agency’ (Magouliotis 2012:
158). This twenty-five-year period of intense architectural practice that
coincides with a publishing gap between his early and late substantial writings
needs, therefore, to be reconsidered. His standard portrayal as a stubborn and
aggressive polemicist who refused to compromise and collaborate, on the one hand, is
hardly consistent with, on the other hand, his numerous public commissions for
large-scale projects — not to mention his successive roles as head of the
Research Department of the State Housing Agency (1955–1957), head and special
advisor of the National Tourism Organisation (1958–1967; 1975–1978). He
could never have commanded such authority in his contemporaneous Greek cultural life
if he was only a lonely polemicist. Hence, the crystallised persona of his late
writings needs to be opened up, too. It needs to be contextualised, and interpreted
in the historically grounded terms of its own gradual formation.
Konstantinidis’s life needs to be closely followed, from the German
architectural education he shared with a select few of his contemporaries (see Theocharopoulou 2010) to the strong contacts he
retained with a European network of fellow architects and institutions (also
including the Ford Institute), contacts that provided him not only professional
recourse for his deliberate ‘self-exile’ (Antoniades 1979: 71) during the first difficult years of the military
junta in Greece (see Konstantinidis 1989: 70;
Cofano 2011: 122), but also funding for
his self-published Elements for Self-Knowledge in 1975 (Konstantinidis 1992c: 194–195).
Architectural historians also need to remove the distorting veil of a persona
created by increasingly fierce polemical manifestos, and follow the historical
thread that leads from his work in the National Tourism Organisation, which
gradually granted him access to international architectural publications, back to
the native social circle that helped him gain access to those state posts in the
first place. It is necessary to understand and contextualise Konstantinidis not only
in terms of a grand international history of architectural ideas and influences (as
in Tsakopoulos (2014: 136) and Terzoglou
(2014)), but also in terms of the
quotidian complications and obstacles arising from the most banal architectural
practices and their institutional contexts that oblige the architect to play
different roles, attempt alliances and collaborations, and adopt tactics of survival
of his vision32 (Fig. 7). Such an approach might enable the emergence of a much more
nuanced and multifarious persona. No longer romanticised in terms of a solitary
architect — and his somewhat quixotic aspirations — against the world
in abstracto, Konstantinidis might therefore appear as
primarily oppositional to a privileged social circle, from which he nonetheless also
rose to key posts of influence and power. Working within it, Konstantinidis’s
polemic is much more significant in concreto, precisely in his
concerted attempt to oppose this status quo through his architectural practice and
the increasingly orchestrated propagation of his vision.

Fig. 7

Removing the veil of a published life: Material from the building permit
folder of the Weekend House in Anavyssos, retrieved from the Prefecture of
Attica’s Urban Planning Agency Archives.

This approach might provide a way for contemporary architectural historians to escape
from Konstantinidis’s almost irresistible stronghold on the reception of his
work. Adopting broader historical and sociological methodologies, in combination
with new archival research — including an increased accessibility to the
personal archive the architect meticulously organised and supplemented during his
retirement years (see Cofano 2010) —
architectural historians may start building their own informed reception of his
works, separate from his self-imposed mythologisation. Comparative studies of
similar developments of regional modernisms and the vernacular in the European South
(Scarano 2006; Sabatino 2010; Agarez
2013) might also provide fertile ground for a fruitful wider
recontextualisation of Konstantinidis’s works, too. To make these questions
more explicit is perhaps the task of the contemporary architectural historian. By
focusing on the published life of an emblematic Konstantinidis project, this article
sought to enable a modest opening in that direction. It can only come to an end at
this moment of reconfiguring the gaze of the architectural historian, the moment
when someone else can finally begin speaking in the bold voice of a novel
interpretation.

Notes

1Only a handful of his Xenia hotels can really compete with, or marginally
surpass, the Weekend House in Anavyssos in terms of publication numbers. For
this primacy of Xenia hotels in publications of Greek architecture abroad, see
Danezis (1995).

2The main concerns of these experimental variations are the specific dimensions of
the ‘steps’ of his grids and the exact thickness of the load-bearing
stone walls.

3Rather significantly, the Weekend House is one of the nine buildings featured in
the posthumous exhibition of Konstantinidis’s work in the United States in
1998. See Fessa-Emmanuil (1998).

4Konstantinidis uses the word
‘σπιτάκι’
instead of ‘σπίτι’ in the original. In
Greek, the use of a diminutive term like this implies a certain kind of
affection. (All translations from the Greek are by the author.)

5The specialised Greek architectural press of the period comprises just two
periodicals: Ζυγός (1955–1983,
published in Athens by Fratzis K. Frantziskakis), and
Αρχιτεκτονική
(1957–1970, published in Athens by Antonis Kitsikis). In 1962, both
publications devoted pages — and even whole monographs — to
Konstantinidis’s work
(Αρχιτεκτονική
11–12: 72–82 and Ζυγός
82–83: 27–50).

6Maria-Luisa Danezis (1995) observes the
lack of a critical approach to Greek architecture by the global press. She also
confirms Konstantinidis’s dominance in the media, with eleven covers and
more than thirty publications in international journals and newspapers devoted
to his work.

7This is the second time in the series that Konstantinidis has one of his works
published, under the aegis of Greek contributing editor, Orestis Doumanis.
However, this second publication is even more important for him, since it is
actually the first time he is responsible for writing the text that will
introduce his own work. The previous publication in the series included single
images from his Xenia hotel on Mykonos and a house in Athens, as well as a
two-page presentation of his Xenia Motel in Kalambaka (Donat 1964: 119, 122–123).

8Indeed, the only instance in Konstantinidis’s rather extensive body of
publications and texts where he directly comments on, or drives the attention of
the reader to, specific accompanying photographs is in the ‘Notes’
section of his self-published Elements for Self-Knowledge:
Towards a True Architecture (1975: 298–325).

9Several years later, in the second volume of his quasi-autobiographical book,
Konstantinidis gladly mentions that a ‘Viennese architectural historian
described [the house in Anavyssos] as “a built worldview”’
(Konstantinidis 1992a: 30).

10It first appeared later in 1964 in Baumeister (12:
1395–1397). The 1964 feature in Architectural Design is
indeed an English-language adaptation of the 1962 feature in
Ζυγός.

11In a Hellenic Public Television documentary directed by T. Anastasopoulos and G.
Papakonstantinou (1990a), Konstantinidis
condenses his architectural design thesis (see 06: 16–07: 35):
‘Every time I had to build something, the first thing that came to mind
was visiting the site — if that was possible, of course. Sitting there I
found the solution in situ. That’s why I would like to
say that — unlike other architects — I never have a first or a
second draft sketch, an initial idea and its subsequent development… by
design! I never went to the drawing board without having already found the
solution on the building site first. The ground and the sky were my own drawing
board; the landscape within which I was trying to imagine the house. Sometimes I
even did this: I was going to see the site from different angles, a little
further, a little closer, and then I returned to the site and, sitting on this
or that stone again, I found the solution in the end. I cannot imagine me
building something without seeing the site’ (translated by the author from
the original Greek).

12It is obvious that the editors requested a consistent overarching strategy of
presenting the anthologised buildings through a short introductory text (printed
in three languages), a characteristic plan and a section drawing, as well as
selected photographs.

13Peter Blundell Jones recently offered an appraisal of this type of architectural
photography in his comments on ‘[t]he classic Miesian photos’ of the
Barcelona pavilion. Such photos ‘echo the frame with the geometry of the
building, gaining a compelling one-point perspective that produces a good
illusion of depth, perhaps the best available in a medium that denies the
perceptual advantages of binocular vision, movement of the head, and the
muscular experience of differential focus’ (Blundell Jones 2012: 49).

14As Blundell Jones asserts, ‘The two-point perspectives work so well because
everything is orthogonal: the geometry is graspable via the image’ (2012: 50).

15He wrote, ‘In front of all these enclosed areas a deep covered verandah is
ranged, so one can sit in the shadow looking at the sea. […] The covered
verandah is supported by walls designed to create shadowed areas when the sun
sets’ (Donat 1965: 131).

16The only exception is Konstantinidis (1992b), where his impressive photographs are published in full
colour — without any relevant accompanying text by the architect, though.
On the other hand, Patrick Keiller refers to the writings of architectural
photographer Eric De Maré to note that ‘the illusion of depth in
photographs of architecture is often most convincing in fine grain, high
contrast, deep focus, monochrome pictures’ (2002: 40). Their end result is one of ‘vertiginous
three-dimensionality’ (2002:
41).

17This is another quite characteristic publishing practice of Konstantinidis. The
inclusion of 16 colour photographs after the initial 166 grayscale ones in
Konstantinidis (1975: 314–317)
serves only to facilitate a discussion of colour in architecture. The appearance
of colour photographs in his publications usually signals a similar discussion,
as in Konstantinidis (1981; 1989).

18A clearly bitter account of this fact is provided by Konstantinidis himself in
the second volume of his quasi-autobiographical book (Konstantinidis 1992a: 29–30).

19Philippidis contends that Konstantinidis recruits photography in his struggle
‘for the prevalence of the unique truth, the main motto of
Konstantinidis’s polemics’ (Philippidis 1997: 60).

22For instance, in Analysing Architecture, the Weekend House was
chosen for analysis as a model for architectural composition (Unwin 1997: 145). It is also the only
example of modern Greek architecture included in the book. The Weekend House has
also appeared in rather unexpected places, such as Shoaf Turner’s
Dictionary of Art and Architecture (1996). The latter is also available on-line: Alexander
Koutamanis. Konstantinidis, Aris. Grove Art Online. Oxford Art
Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T047329
(accessed 26 February 2014).

23Leatherbarrow’s approach to Konstantinidis’s work had already been
critiqued by Eleni Fessa-Emmanuil before the publication of the book:
‘Despite the very interesting remarks and correlations attempted by the
speaker, the fact remains that his starting hypothesis does not express the
essence of Konstantinidis’s architecture; what concerned him was not
originality, but the question of type or the “rule” of
construction’ (Fessa-Emmanuil 1998:
22).

24Konstantinidis seemed to have only a handful of good friends, such as Nicolaos
Th. Holevas (1998), who publically
praised his all too human side, in an attempt to defend him from accusations of
snobbery.

26Theocharopoulou (2010) explores similar
tensions in Konstantinidis’s thinking in her dual contextualisation of his
vernacular investigations, which are associated both with the established
research practices of laographical (i.e. folk) studies in modern Greece and his
German architectural education. Since she also briefly explores the
Konstantinidis-Loos dialectics, I have opted to turn my attention to the
Konstantinidis-Corbusier dialectics, without challenging Colomina’s
interpretation of the latter. Last but not least, Theocharopoulou’s work
suggests the relation of Konstantinidis’s work on the Greek anonymous
vernacular to that of his contemporaneous masters and colleagues, Dimitris
Pikionis and Constantinos A. Doxiadis.

27See his furious 1972 ‘open letter’ to publisher Orestis Doumanis for
daring to modify the original form of the material he had submitted (reprinted
in Konstantinidis 1984: 246–264).
The incident marked the end of his collaboration with Doumanis’s
periodicals. Almost a decade later, when a recently retired Konstantinidis
wanted to publish his monograph, he turned to Stavros Petsopoulos, whose
award-winning small publishing house remains well known for their attention to
detail in book design (having most recently won the Primo Premio Maggiore in the
Italian Ministry of Culture National Awards for Foreign Publishers 2014, as well
as the 1983 Leipzig Book Fair Prize for the aesthetics of their pocket-book
series). According to Petsopoulos, ‘Konstantinidis provided the precise
design of his books (including covers). For his Buildings and
Projects he had especially prepared an amazing hand-made collage of
blown-up and condensed photographs, and then submitted those independently
laid-out pages to be photographed. […] It is also true that we had never
allowed anybody else to design their books like this before. Later we allowed a
few more exceptions […] for people like Emmanouil Kasdaglis, Dimitris
Kalokyris, Alexis Kyritsopoulos who had a long established relation with, or
belonged to a long tradition of, typography and books; and some photographers,
as well’ (e-mail correspondence with the author, 14 February 2014).

28Magouliotis contends that ‘The architect at this point […] wants to
erect his visions and see them undisturbed for a moment before “the world
[tears] them down”. So he reaches the point of confessing that his works
only give him pleasure in the brief period stretching from their completion to
the moment their inhabitation begins. The period before the design and
construction phases is an oppressive sequence of compromises and fights filled
with agonising attempts to keep the work free of the client’s vices, while
the period after is marked by the client’s interventions, which alienate
the architect from his own work’ (2012:
160).

29Blundell Jones makes a similar point when he notes that ‘[t]he much admired
promenade architecturale is simply that, perfectly geared
to impress the first time visitor’ (2012:
49–50).

30Rattenbury agrees: ‘Pevsner said Lincoln cathedral was architecture and a
bicycle shed was a building. You could easily argue that, if he’d only put
the bicycle shed in one of his books, it would have become architecture’
(2002: xxii).

31In the case of Dimitris Pikionis, the problem is exactly the opposite. He needs
to be discovered behind a multitude of references, testimonies, personal
confessions and second-hand evaluations of his work from those that rebuild it
in his name — since he remains ever-silent.

32A similar, quotidian and all too human interpretative approach has recently been
followed by Antonakakis (2013) for the
case of Pikionis. Konstantinidis’s own writings can also provide
encouraging hints to such an approach (1992c:
165). See also Antoniades (1979:
68–9)

Acknowledgements

This article initially came to life as a final paper for Panayotis
Tournikiotis’s 2007–2008 ‘Modern Greek Architecture’
Master’s seminar at the National Technical University of Athens. Since that
first writing was originally inspired by Dimitris Philippidis’s 1997 essay on
Aris Konstantinidis and his means of expression, I dedicate this article to both of
my former tutors, as a sign of gratitude for their years of teaching and mentoring
that have indubitably shaped me as an architectural historian. I would also like to
thank the editors, Maarten Delbeke and Panayiota Pyla, as well as the two anonymous
reviewers of the journal, for their thoroughly constructive comments that have
considerably reinforced this article’s relevance to an international audience.
I am also grateful to Wesley Aelbrecht for his expert advice on architectural
photography literature, as well as Peg Rawes and Lenore Hietkamp for their close
reading of the final draft. Since an earlier version of this article was presented
at the ‘Still Architecture: Photography, Vision and Cultural Transmission
conference’ at the University of Cambridge (3–5 May 2012), I would also
like to thank the participants for their fruitful suggestions. Last but by no means
least, I am indebted to Dimitris Konstantinidis, Dimitris Philippidis, Marina
Lathouri, Pamela L Quick, Stavros Petsopoulos, Dimitra Pipili, Dionysia S. Daskalou,
Andreas Loukakis, Paola Cofano, Sofia Tsiraki, Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, and Aliki-Myrto
Perysinaki. Without them, I would not have been able to retrieve crucial material
and acquire permission to reproduce the images that illustrate this article. My PhD
research on the postmodern fermentations of architecture in 1980s Greece is
currently conducted at The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) under a three-year
scholarship from the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (‘Lifelong
Learning’ Programme European Social Fund, NSRF 2007–13).

Blundell Jones, P (2012). The Photo-dependent, the Photogenic and the Unphotographable: How
Our Understanding of the Modern Movement Has Been Conditioned by
Photography In: Higgott, A and Wray, T eds. Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern
City. Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 47–60.

Terzoglou, N-I (2014). The ‘Will to Live’ as Architecture: Assumptions
regarding the Philosophical Background of Aris Konstantinidis’s
Thinking In: Congress of Architectural History: Historiography of Architecture in
Greece between XX and XXI Century. Architecture and Arts between
‘Greekness’ and Globalization. 24 May 2014, Athens, PA Available online at
http://aht.asfa.gr/index.php/component/content/article/19/222--full-papers
(accessed 28 May 2014).

Theocharopoulou, I (2010). Nature and the People: The Vernacular and the Search for a True
Greek Architecture In: Lejeune, J-F and Sabatino, M eds. Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and
Contested Identities. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 111–129.

Tzonis, A and Lefaivre, L (1985). The Grid and the Pathway: An Introduction to the Work of Dimitris
and Suzana Antonakakis in the Context of Greek Architectural
Culture In: Frampton, K ed. Atelier 66: The Architecture of Dimitris and Suzana Antonakakis. New York: Rizzoli.

Giamarelos, S., 2014. The Art of Building Reception: Aris Konstantinidis behind the Global Published Life of his Weekend House in Anavyssos (1962–2014). Architectural Histories, 2(1), p.Art. 22. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.bx

Giamarelos S. The Art of Building Reception: Aris Konstantinidis behind the Global Published Life of his Weekend House in Anavyssos (1962–2014). Architectural Histories. 2014;2(1):Art. 22. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.bx

Giamarelos, S. (2014). The Art of Building Reception: Aris Konstantinidis behind the Global Published Life of his Weekend House in Anavyssos (1962–2014). Architectural Histories, 2(1), Art. 22. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.bx

Giamarelos S, ‘The Art of Building Reception: Aris Konstantinidis Behind the Global Published Life of His Weekend House in Anavyssos (1962–2014)’ (2014) 2 Architectural Histories Art. 22 DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.bx